Читать книгу The Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice - Группа авторов - Страница 40

This chapter, written by Tanya Mudry and Tom Strong, echoes the philosophical viewpoint of the previous chapter. The authors focus on researching socio-material practices – those that conjoin humans with material elements of their situations. Their aim is to show ways to ‘zoom in’ in order to research specific socio-material practices as concurrent doings, sayings, and relatings, while also ‘zooming out’ to research bigger picture influences sustaining socio-material practices.

Socio-material practices exemplify how humans routinely interact with material phenomena to reproduce experiences and relations, and effectively meld with these phenomena. Practices acquire their ‘second nature’ through becoming conjoined in networks and assemblages and then persist because they have a kind of life support system that extends beyond the person caught up in sustaining them. To illustrate, systemic therapy seeking to change unwanted family practices tends to be in competition with other practices engaging the family beyond the consulting room. Thus, a focus on a specific practice in order to create change may seem like bucking the tide when the practice is part of a greater network or assemblage of practices. An important difference relates to the focus of the chapter, which is on integrating the details of a therapy case involving gambling. It is an important narrative in that it allows the significance of the human/non-human interweave to be explored.